


Blue Bird

by B_R_M



Category: Naruto
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Being weak is not an option, Blood and Gore, Butterfly Effect, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Romance, F/M, Family, Family isn't always blood, FemSasu - Freeform, M/M, No space aliens because wtf, Ouch right in the feels, Sasuke doesn't know her, Slow Romance, Survivor Guilt, Uchiha Sasuke Needs a Hug, Unreliable Narrator, Uzumaki Naruto Needs a Hug, With power comes great destructability, avengers avenging, no that's not right, responsibility?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:40:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25961461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/B_R_M/pseuds/B_R_M
Summary: She wasn't male and neither was the body that she inhabited. So, she couldn't be Sasuke Uchiha, the Avenger. Just like how the boy who called himself her older brother couldn't be Itachi Uchiha, the Clan Slayer. (Semi-SI. FemSasu. Butterfly Effect.)
Relationships: TBD - Relationship
Comments: 10
Kudos: 91





	1. A Scattered Dream

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Hello all! I've seen a lot of SI rebirth fics, but I've never seen one where Sasuke is reborn born as a girl. Which is what inspired me to write this. A thing to keep in mind: I've never finished the Naruto series. I've gotten a little far in Shippuden and I know a majority of the big events that end up happening. So while my character is reborn as FemSasu, she doesn't have a bunch of foreknowledge to use as an advantage. So this will not be a fix-it fic. As for a pairing, I'm like 99% sure I'm going to have a romantic pairing somewhere in here, but that wouldn't happen for a long time and it won't be the focus.
> 
> Also, this fic is rated M for Mature because it will include some dark themes and blood and gore. Just a warning.~

Death.

One word, five letters, a single syllable, encompassed everything and yet nothing at all. Held so much mystery, pain, hope, fear, loneliness. It was known as the end-all-be-all of things. All life, at some point in time, would always end with one word.

If you asked her how she'd come to know the definition, she wouldn't have been able to tell you. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes and laid her head down to rest, the image of the sea would paint itself behind the back of her lids. Of a blue so deep in color that it blended with the darkness around the edges. And she'd remember the feeling of sinking down into the cold embrace of the invisible arms that beckoned her.

The sight of the water's surface so far away should have terrified her, and it had. But it was peaceful in a way, at least once she'd accepted that she wouldn't be able to reach it. There was something soothing about floating beneath the edge of the world where nothing could touch her, not even the sun that glinted its rays off the surface too high up to find her.

There were religions, in a far off world that she could barely remember, that believed in life after death. Of some perfect place where the soul would go to rest and reunite with the friends and family of those that were lost. But she had never been the worshipping type. At least she didn't think that she had been.

All she could remember was that blue, blue sea.

And then the fall into darkness.

Which was ironic whenever she looked back on it, that the first thing to greet her when the world faded from azure to black and came back into focus once again, was a deep, dark blue. She'd been confused as to why it was hovering above her. Hadn't she just been floating? Blinking slowly- _oh so slowly_ -she'd tried her best to get a grasp on what was happening. Her gaze shifted upwards until nothing but darkness met it in return.

Except that time it wasn't the all-encompassing kind that spelled the end of life, but a single pair of eyes. They were large, though not overly so, and slanted slightly upwards at the edges. Long eyelashes that matched the color of their pupils and the hair that framed a jaw, stared down from where they were set deep into a pale face that looked young. That belonged to a child. A boy by the looks of it, though feminine features did touch him around the straight bridge of his nose and pointed, angular chin.

She hadn't been sure where she was, who that was, or what was happening. All she'd known was that she was lying atop a soft surface with wooden bars surrounding her on all sides. And that a pair of dark eyes were watching her. So she'd done what any other living being in her position would have.

She'd screamed...

A sound high pitched and grating fell from her mouth and pierced the air around her.

...And cried.

The boy hovering above flinched back, his eyes widening in both surprise and concern before he leaned further over the wooden bars beneath his hands. He wasn't very tall so his head barely even cleared the top of them, but he'd made use of what little height he did have.

"Shhh!" His lips weren't too thin, nor were they thick; somewhere in between and pink in color. The voice that sprang from them was pitched from adolescence and filled with alarm. She hadn't been able to understand whatever it was that he'd said because it came out in a nonsensical array of sounds that she couldn't interpret.

" _Shh, shh_!" One of his small hands-pale like the rest of him, but pink with a scar that ran down his pointer finger-gently touched the side of her face in an attempt to calm her down. The feeling of his skin on hers was surprisingly soothing...Or perhaps it was just the shock from the abnormal warmth that bled from him that caused her tears to slow. She'd been cold once, so cold that she'd forgotten the feeling of heat.

A blinding smile hitched up at the corners of his mouth when the screams ceased to spill from her throat. And his eyes, not as dark as she'd once thought, crinkled and his lips pulled back around his teeth. Again, she'd had no idea what he was murmuring to her. Well, at least until _something_ familiar hit her ears.

" _Sasuke-chan_."

Wait.

Wait.

What did that mean and why did the sound of it tug on some memory from a different place that she couldn't quite recall?

" _Sasuke-chan,_ " he said it again, softer that time. His hair fell into his face, but he didn't bother to fix it. Just brushed the tears that had wet her face with the back of the finger that held the scar. " _Imouto_."

The sound of a door opening interrupted whatever trance he'd put over her and he pulled his hand away and glanced behind him. A feminine voice filled the room from a person that she couldn't see beyond the four walls of her wooden prison. But she'd figured that there was nothing to be afraid of when the boy greeted whoever it was with a smile. Until yet another familiar _something_ fell from the stranger's mouth.

" _Itachi-kun_."

Oh.

Oh...

That couldn't be right, could it? Either she'd misheard or the two words that rang a bell in the back of her mind somewhere meant nothing. Perhaps she was still dead, or trapped in some otherworldly afterlife where things didn't make sense. But no, as the boy turned to speak to the person she had yet to see, her eyes caught blue again. His shirt. On the back of it, right between his shoulder blades, was a symbol stitched in red and white: an uchiwa fan.

 _...Oh_.

She screamed.

* * *

"Sasuke-chan, come here."

She- _not Sasuke, she couldn't_ be _Sasuke_ -blinked up at the voice calling her name. The woman that looked back at her was one of the prettiest people that she'd ever seen. Not that she'd seen a lot of people, at least she didn't remember doing so, but that was beside the point. Her face was soft and slim and filled with the same sharp angles that she'd seen in the boy's- _not Itachi_ -own features. Though he had yet to grow into them.

Long obsidian hued hair flowed down to the center of her back and she reached up a hand to brush her long bangs from her eyes, gesturing Sasuke over with the other. Mikoto Uchiha held a hairbrush in between her fingers and two blue hair ties adorned her wrist. One of her favorite pastimes, Sasuke (who would give their daughter a boy's name anyway?) had discovered, was dressing her daughter up like a doll.

But Sasuke never minded, not when it brought _that_ smile to the older woman's face. The one where her expressive dark eyes warmed over with joy and softened with something that Sasuke refused to acknowledge _(because none of it was real anyway)_. And that tiny, tiny dimple that had become more and more rare over the days, showed itself from where it hid between the corner of her mouth and one of her angular cheekbones.

The time that had passed from when she'd first gained awareness, to where she now sat on the wooden floor of a living room, was immeasurable. Sasuke had no way of being able to tell the days apart from each other. Sometimes she'd wake up when it was still dark outside and other times when the sun had already risen high above the clouds.

She was young, barely a toddler from what she'd been able to figure out, but she didn't know how old she was exactly. After that first day, she'd gone into a bit of shock. Between the names, the uchiwa symbol that covered almost every article of clothing and hung on a tapestry on her bedroom wall and was proudly displayed for the world to see, she wasn't sure what to do with herself.

Memories of a story back in a world that she could no longer recall had sprung forth to the front of her mind. It told of a child born of prophecy, a girl who would one day help change the world, and a boy who'd become lost on a path that no one else could follow. Naruto Uzumaki, Sakura Haruno, and Sasuke Uchiha.

She didn't know the whole story, had never finished it and therefore only knew bits and pieces. But what she could remember was that Sasuke Uchiha was not a good person. He had walked a lonely life filled with nothing but loss and anger and pain and sadness. And had been, without a doubt, _male_. She wasn't a boy and neither was the body that she inhabited. So she couldn't be _Sasuke Uchiha_ , the Avenger. Just like how the boy who called himself her older brother couldn't be _Itachi Uchiha_ , the Clan Slayer.

Because her older brother was soft, gentle, sweet. The person who told her stories when she cried with words that she could barely understand. Who'd been the first to witness the tentative, beginning steps that she'd taken across the floor of her bedroom. Who'd been right behind her to catch her when she stumbled and fell. Who's name had been the first word that she'd uttered in this new world.

He'd been pressured, she vaguely remembered, blackmailed into slaughtering every Uchiha that resided within the gates of Konohagakure. All except Sasuke. She couldn't remember why or when, just that it hadn't been his choice. And that afterwards he'd fled the village and joined an organization that was filled with nothing but liars and murderers and traitors.

Itachi Uchiha had been too kindhearted for the path that he'd been forced to walk, but too selfless to let himself die alongside the one person he could save. Which was exactly why Sasuke was going to do everything in her power to make sure that her brother never had to turn out that way. Never had to carry that burden.

Because her brother was _not_ Itachi Uchiha.

The upside of being part of a family, a clan that prided itself on being nothing but the best, was that her elevated intelligence wasn't that surprising. Nor was it odd. It was expected even, given just how much of a genius her older brother was. And he was.

A genius, that is. Though luckily, (she didn't know it was luck at the time, but would come to understand later) he had been enough to take on the burden of being the clan prodigy. So no one looked twice at her accomplishments.

Sasuke had never been a genius Before, at least she didn't think that she had been. So her ability to understand the world around her must have come with the fact that she'd been _aware_ of it so early in life. Maybe it was because it wasn't her first one, or perhaps she was cheating somehow with the select few memories that did bleed through.

They were never anything substantial, but she didn't really care since they'd given her the brain function to know certain things before the proper age. Like walking. She'd known _how_ to do it, but getting her tiny slow body to respond had made it more difficult than it'd needed to be. Communication skills were there too, though she still had to learn to read, write, and talk.

The downside to being born into the Uchiha clan, was that once she showed her intelligence, she'd been expected to pick up everything else just as fast. Not just basic life skills, but shinobi ones as well. Which seeing how she _hadn't_ been one in her previous life, she was slow in adjusting to it.

But she was going to give it her all because Sasuke had a goal to meet. A brother to save.

There were a lot of ways that children were taught the basics of ninja skills without it being obvious that that was what they were learning. Whether it was through hand games disguised to learn dexterity, or rounds of hide-and-go-seek to teach hunting and stealth, or children's books that told dumbed down versions of stories to assimilate kids into the mindset that shinobi life was glamorous. One filled with heroic missions and selfless deeds from those who served their villages like mindless soldiers.

Sasuke could somewhat remember the militaries of her old world from Before, and how the ones in charge sent their people out to die for a cause that they were forced to pledge their lives to. She could draw the parallels to her new life because they weren't so different from one another in that sense. Villages instilled a sense of pride into their shinobi, their soldiers, so that they would be willing to fight for it. Sometimes when Mikoto took Sasuke out into the backyard to do their morning stretches, Sasuke wondered how many people spilled their blood to feed the grass that tickled the bottoms of her bare feet.

* * *

It was shortly after her second birthday that Sasuke was first taken outside of the clan compound. The section of the village that was owned by the Uchiha was like a gated community, where no one but those who shared their blood were allowed past the two shinobi who guarded the gate. Inside of the compound was like a miniature village by itself with shops and stalls and training grounds. Everywhere you looked, an uchiwa fan was displayed proudly. Sasuke liked to joke to herself that they were plastered to every other wall just in case a stranger accidentally wandered past the gate and didn't know where they were.

Clan children were allowed to roam free anywhere within the safety of the walls without adult supervision. However, for some reason that Sasuke hadn't been able to figure out, they weren't allowed outside of them alone. Not that she was even given the freedom to leave her own house without one of her mother or Itachi accompanying her. Maybe it was because her father was the head of the clan? Sasuke wasn't sure, but that rule would have made sense for _Itachi_ since he was the heir and all.

Whatever. None of it really mattered anyway because she was _not_ Sasuke Uchiha and none of what she was experiencing was real anyway.

"Come on, Sasuke-chan." Mikoto reached out a hand to grab onto Sasuke's as they approached the compound gate. The path leading up to it wasn't very populated since the majority of the clan tended to migrate closer inwards, where the Uchiha owned shops and homes were.

It was set up like a giant ring that reminded Sasuke of the inside of a sliced onion. On the outer rings, closer to the compound walls, were the homes of the more lower tiered clan members or those who weren't high up in the shinobi hierarchy. A few training grounds were sprinkled in between those houses where the forest grew and stretched. The closer that you got to the center of the compound (which was where she and her family lived), the more expensive the homes became.

Even without the flashes of foreknowledge that Sasuke had of that world, she would have been able to piece together the fact that the Uchiha were very elitist. Not only did they view themselves as better than anyone who _wasn't_ a part of the clan, they carried those habits in-house as well. The stronger the shinobi, the better the social standing and sway they had within the clan.

"Don't wander off, okay?"

Sasuke looked up from where she'd been staring at her pale toes sticking out from the tops of her blue ( _blue, always blue_ , she thought) sandals and up towards her mother. Mikoto wasn't looking at her, so it was difficult for Sasuke to read the expression on her face. But as they passed through the compound gate, Sasuke stopped trying to get a peak.

Her eyes were instantly drawn to the short stone path that led up to the gate and took in the towering buildings. She wouldn't have been able to ignore them even if she tried, not with how obnoxiously hued they all were. With the bright, cloudless sky as a backdrop, the whole scene reminded Sasuke of a painting. One where it looked like the artist threw a random combination of colors at it until they were satisfied.

Sasuke would be lying if she said that she wasn't feeling a little bit excited at being out of the compound for the first time. She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting the village of Konohagakure to look like, but she'd been imagining it for as long as she'd been aware of where she was. Some part of her, a tiny part from Before, was giddy at being inside of _the_ Konoha. (Even if it all was a dream.)

Her mother's hand tightening around her own didn't even register once Sasuke caught her first glimpse of people flying over the rooftops above her head. They were fast, too quick for her to see their faces. And the stone lined streets themselves were way more packed than the ones in the Uchiha compound. Sasuke was so used to the thinner roads that the wider ones of the village proper felt a little overwhelming.

Occasionally they'd pass a shinobi or two who bore the symbol of the Konoha Police and she was able to recognize the familiar features of her clansmen. She couldn't to see a lot of the village itself since she was looking out of the point of view of a child too short to even reach her mother's thighs. But when they reached an intersection that branched off towards a long line of road, filled to the brim with restaurants and grocery stores and stalls with owners shouting about their wares and people haggling over prices, Sasuke first saw it.

High above the top of the tallest building and carved into the mountain that overlooked the village, was something that set off alarms in the back of her mind. Four faces of Konoha's past and present Hokage were carved into the rock bigger than anything she had ever seen before. Sasuke didn't know why it was such a huge shock to see it, but the sight slammed into her with a force that had her breath catching in her throat.

Because it made everything seem so _real_. Made the world beyond the safety of the compound walls _real_. If you ever asked her when she'd first come to the realization that maybe, just maybe, she wasn't stuck inside of some nightmarish dream, she would have told you that it was right then and there.

 _Strike One_ , she'd thought.

The monument disappeared behind the brightly painted sign of some shop that Sasuke could just barely read (Mikoto had been teaching her hiragana and katakana with some kanji sprinkled in). And soon enough, her attention was drawn to the stall that her mother stopped in front of. Vegetables that weren't available within the clan compound lined the display in a multitude of different shapes and sizes.

Sasuke was so intensely focused on trying to soak up everything at once that it took her an embarrassingly long time to notice it. The air between her mother and the select few other Uchiha in the crowded market was tense when it came to the other villagers. Both shinobi and civilians alike gave them a wide berth when they passed one another, like the Uchiha had some kind of disease that they didn't want to catch.

No one said anything outright, so Sasuke had no clue as to _why_ it was happening. And why her mother's grip on her hand tightened, and the soft edges around the older woman's face sharpened with stress that pulled at the corners of her mouth.

"Mom?" Confused, Sasuke tugged on her mother's hand until she spared her a questioning glance. "Why is everyone staring?"

Mikoto gave her a tiny smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Not now, Sasuke-chan."

Sasuke was a good kid, at least she liked to think so. She never complained when her father barely gave her the time of day, didn't fight when her mother put her to bed when she wasn't tired, soaked up everything she was given to learn like a sponge. But that didn't mean that she was going to let the odd situation go that easily.

She was five years old when she was first taught how to properly throw a weapon. A blunted one, but a weapon all the same.

"Nii-chan," Sasuke whined, glaring up at the ringed target attached to a throwing post twice her size. "It's not working."

Itachi let the handful of sharp edged shuriken hooked between his fingers fly. They sliced through the air faster than Sasuke could catch and embedded themselves inside of the red bulls-eye in quick succession. The sun high above the trees surrounding the clearing that they were in glinted off the metal headband tied around her brother's forehead. Pressed onto the surface was the swirling leaf symbol of Konohagakure.

Sasuke had been two-and-a-half years old when Itachi came home late one afternoon with it knotted around the back of his head. She'd known that he'd attended the ninja academy and had been since she was barely able to walk. And she hadn't been surprised to learn that he'd graduated way earlier than most children did. He was a genius, a prodigy, and excelled in anything and everything he touched.

"What's not working?" A touch of fond amusement glinted in Itachi's dark eyes as he took in Sasuke's slumped shoulders and unwavering glower.

"I can't hit it," she pointed at the pile of blunted practice kunai lying lifelessly in the dirt too far to the left of the post. Sasuke had ambushed her brother the second that he'd walked through the front door of their house earlier that day. She'd attached herself to his arm like a barnacle and refused to let go until he'd agreed to take her to their training grounds.

 _Their_ training grounds. The one that lay on the outskirts near the river that cut through the outer ring and wall of the clan compound. No one else ever used it. Or if they did, Sasuke had never seen them. Itachi would take her whenever he had the time to, which was beginning to become more and more of a rarity as time went on. His schedule was becoming more busy with ninja things that Sasuke didn't get to know about.

Sure, she knew that he had a team and they took missions and sometimes he disappeared with their father and the rest of the decrepit, stern faced clan elders. But he never told her what exactly it was that he did and she never asked. Not when it brought that frown to his face that made him seem so much older than nine.

"Let me see," Itachi gestured for Sasuke to pick her kunai up from the ground and she scrambled over to do so.

Her black capri pants had dirt dusted around the bottom from where she'd attempted to take him on in a taijutsu spar (and failed miserably). And her dark grey, short sleeve shirt with the uchiwa fan embroidered on the back was one that she'd had to beg her mother to buy her. Mikoto had an obsession with dressing her up in cute sundresses and pretty skirts which were extremely impractical for training.

Sasuke walked backwards until she stood a few feet away from the target, shifted the handful of kunai to her right hand and grasped the handle of one in her left. She'd discovered early that she was ambidextrous, but preferred using her left whenever she had a choice between the two.

The weight of the practice weapon was heavy in her tiny fist, but she didn't pay it any mind as she took aim. Her brows furrowed deeply in concentration before she drew her arm back until it was parallel with her chest, and then flung it forward, letting the metal fly from her hand. Like all the rest of them before it, the kunai steered too far to the left of the target and sunk handle up into the dirt.

"See?" Sasuke glared at the ground like it'd personally offended her.

Itachi hummed before crossing over to her side. "You're letting go of it too late. Here, do it again, but this time let go when I tell you to."

She blinked up at him, but shifted another one into the palm of her hand and took aim once again. Sasuke took a steady breath to center her balance and drew back her arm, fingers shifting along the grooves of the kunai's handle. Her arm snapped forwards and at Itachi's "now" she let the weapon slip from her grasp.

A resounding _thud_ echoed through the clearing as the blunted kunai sank into the wood behind the paper target. It wasn't a bulls-eye and sat on one of the outer rings of the circle, but Sasuke counted it as a small victory anyways. She turned a blinding grin up at her older brother and was met with the feeling of his index and middle finger tapping gently against the center of her forehead.

"Now try it again without me calling it this time."

* * *

"Be careful, Imouto."

Sasuke didn't bother to verbally respond to the call of her brother's voice behind her. She was too busy racing to grab onto the metal bars that separated her from what seemed like the edge of the world. Her eyes were wide, mouth parted as she gaped at the view from the village from atop the Hokage mountain. The point of the Hokage Tower's spire seemed so small, so far away from where she stood.

A few people were scattered across the giant staircase carved into the side of the mountain in their venture to climb to the top. Sasuke's thighs were still aching and her lungs begged for air from the journey, but she didn't care. How could she, with a view like that? The sun was starting to set, painting the sky orange and yellow and pink. Konoha was a very large village, one that was difficult to get the actual scale of it from the ground.

Trees and parks were sprinkled in between homes and shops and streets. From so high up, Sasuke could see the collection of training grounds in the far distance. She'd never been to any of the ones outside of the clan compound, so she wasn't sure how much they differed. Not that it really mattered, but she still wondered.

The sound of Itachi approaching from behind met her ears and Sasuke knew that if he truly did not want her to know that he was there, she wouldn't. He'd recently returned from a mission that'd taken him out of the village for two weeks. Whatever tiredness he may have felt disappeared beneath the surface the moment Sasuke shuffled through his bedroom door. Just last month, he'd taken the Chūnin exams. He'd succeeded of course, she'd had no doubts that he would, but she still thought that he was too young.

(Too young to fight, too young to bleed, too young to sacrifice everything for a village that would never do the same.)

Mikoto had taken her back to the village market to do more shopping, so she hadn't been able to greet her brother when he'd first gotten home. Sasuke had been wanting to see the top of the Hokage mountain since she'd first laid her eyes on it, and Itachi had indulged her request without a fight. A part of her felt guilty at the fact that she was taking up his precious free time that he rarely ever got. But Sasuke was determined to do everything in her power to save him from himself. Or whatever it was that was the catalyst to his imminent betrayal.

(Because her Itachi wasn't _Itachi Uchiha_.)

She wasn't sure what she could even do to prevent it from happening when she didn't even know _why_ it would happen in the first place. But she had an idea, hints that had been popping up in her peripheral when adults weren't being careful enough to hide their thoughts from their faces or the words from their lips.

"Nii-san?" Sasuke rested her chin on one of the metal bars that she was just tall enough to reach. Itachi leaned against the railing next to her, his elbows able to prop themselves up easily. He hummed at her questioning tone and she took that as an invitation to continue. "Why does the rest of the village not like us?"

Itachi's head jerked around to stare down at her and she met his stare fearlessly. His expression filtered rapidly through a plethora of emotions-surprise, bewilderment, something that she couldn't discern-before settling into a blank faced mask. One that Sasuke had only seen him wear when their father dragged him off somewhere that she wasn't allowed to follow.

He turned his gaze back out towards the village that lay far below, where their words couldn't quite reach. There were only two other pairs of people on the mountain and they stood so far away that Sasuke wasn't even able to make out the color of their eyes. But when Itachi spoke, his voice was quiet, low. "What makes you say that, Imouto?"

She took in his profile, from the way his eyebrows were slightly furrowed and the tiniest hint of a frown touched the edges of his mouth. His black hair had gotten longer over the years and now disappeared beneath the high collar of his indigo shirt. If Sasuke hadn't known her brother as well as she did, she would've missed the hesitant edge of his tone.

She watched his face for any changes that might give her a hint of what he was thinking. "Everyone always _stares_ at us like they're afraid we're going to attack them or something. Why is that?"

There was a long, long pause where Sasuke thought that Itachi wasn't going to respond to her at all. That he would just pretend like she'd never spoken, never asked the question that'd been plaguing her mind ever since that first trip to the market. But just as she was about to prod him, he answered with a deep sigh.

"It is nothing for you to worry about."

Sasuke frowned. "But if it has to do with the clan, why shouldn't I?"

Itachi's dark eyes flickered over her face before looking away again. "Because it is complicated and you are too young."

"But-"

His hand landed on top of her head and he ruffled her hair and pushed off the railing, effectively stopping her argument before she could finish making it. "We should be getting home. It's late."

Sasuke stared the uchiwa fan stitched into the back of his shirt as Itachi started towards the staircase. And when he glanced over his shoulder and beckoned her to follow, she started after him like the obedient child that she was. But that didn't mean that she was going to let it go. No, that conversation was far from over.


	2. R.E.M.

The sounds of the forest echoed through Sasuke's eardrums past the heavy, fierce beating of her heart. Her breath was coming in short, sporadic pants that she couldn't stop to catch. She was lucky to even be able to keep her feet moving at the pace that they were without tripping over an exposed tree root. Accidentally twisting her ankle was not how she wanted to get caught.

Because she _couldn't_ get caught. Not with everything that was on the line.

Sasuke only had the moment to spare to silently send up thanks to whatever kami was listening that it wasn't raining. While it might have helped her in hiding from her purser in the long run, the trees were so close together that their high branches blotted out the sun, and if it rained she'd be essentially blind.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been running, but she knew that enough time had passed for her purser to have bridged whatever gap she'd initially put between them. And from the way her aching, burning thighs threatened to send her collapsing face down in the dirt, Sasuke had to come up with a plan-and fast.

The path that she'd taken, zig-zagging through the bushes and trees in an attempt to cover her tracks, was more like a blatant red arrow pointing at her location than what'd she'd hoped to accomplish. Not like she would have been any less likely to be hunted down if she'd been successful. She wasn't skilled enough in stealth to have been able to use it in her mad dash, but she'd have to make do with what she had. Sasuke's feet skidded to a halt, sandals scruffing along the grass.

She'd hated them at first-the sandals. Everyone wore them, from civilian to shinobi to the Hokage. They were ugly and looked impractical and were last but not least, _blue_. Never had she disliked something more than the dreadful color that reminded her of things that she didn't want to remember. But in the end, Sasuke had grown used to them. Had even been able to see how useful they were. With large grooves cut into the soles for easy grip to numerous surfaces and an extreme amount of ankle support, there was a reason why they were so widely used.

Sasuke didn't have an innate, useful chakra sensing ability to be able to know when someone else was nearby. But she didn't need one because she could _feel_ it; her impending capture. Since she couldn't outrun her purser on foot, well, the only way to go was up. Placing her hands on the rough bark of the nearest tree, Sasuke tilted her head back and, silently cursing herself for not thinking to tie up her shoulder length hair, had to dispel the oncoming bout of vertigo.

Konohagakure was no stranger to trees; hell, it was in the _name_. But unlike normal ones, the trees that were planted both within the village and outside of it in the Land of Fire were obnoxiously large. They grew out of the ground and towered above like monstrous, mutant Ents. Instead of letting them rule the land, Konoha shinobi ruled them. Took to the trees like they were born as monkeys instead of men. Which meant that Sasuke was more than familiar with climbing them.

The lowest branch of her chosen tree was just tall enough for her to be able to grab onto it when she stood on the tips of her toes. She hoisted herself up, lungs wheezing with the effort. Barely a second was spared before she was pulling herself up onto the next one. Sasuke did her best to silence all the noise that she knew she was making, but it was difficult to be quiet when she could hardly hear past the drum of her heart beating in her ears. At least the adrenaline numbed the sting of her palms scraping open on the tree bark.

It wasn't until she was so high up that the ground below seemed more like a hard to reach dream than reality that she stopped. Pushing her back up against the thick trunk behind her, Sasuke hooked her legs as far around the branch supporting her as she could. She hadn't learned how to use chakra to tree walk yet, though she could (and proudly did) use it to climb the wall of her bedroom like a stubborn gecko. But she couldn't hold it for longer than a minute before her small, six-year-old chakra stores ran low. There was something different about tree walking that made it extremely difficult for her to grasp the concept of.

Closing her eyes, Sasuke tilted her head back and used the meditative techniques that her mother taught her to slow her heart rate and catch her breath. Meditation and stretching exercises were a part of the morning routine that had been set for her the day she'd learned how to walk. Every clan child, whether Uchiha or Hyūga or Yamanaka or whoever, started learning early in preparation for the Academy and she was no exception.

Becoming a ninja, a kunoichi, hadn't even been an option given to her. Because of the simple fact that she was born to the Clan Head and hadn't been cursed with the inability to mold chakra, it was expected of her. Forced on her. Maybe in another life if she'd been born to nameless parents who let her pick her path in life, she would have chosen a calmer one. One filled with easy smiles and simple chores and blood that didn't need to be spilled. But she didn't, so she couldn't. And Sasuke knew that even if she had that choice now, becoming a kunoichi was a decision that she would've made ten times over.

Because she had a mission to accomplish.

"There you are, Imouto."

If you asked Sasuke later on, she would have denied the accusation that she'd let out a scream of surprise. Nor had she practically jumped out of her skin to the point where her nails digging into the deep grooves of the bark beneath her hands were the only things keeping her from taking a deep dive to the ground below.

Her eyes snapped open to meet a pair so similar to her own that it was like looking into a mirror. Though instead of them reflecting her fear driven, dilated pupils, his only showed amusement. Even in the semi-darkness gifted by the leaves high above blotting out the sun, whatever light that was there caught on the metal of Itachi's hitai-ate. He was crouching with his hands braced on the bark to stay balanced on the thick branch, though Sasuke knew he didn't need the extra point of stability.

The high collar of his black shirt hid the upward quirk of his mouth that she knew was there. Because even when his face took on the patented Uchiha Stoic Mask, Itachi's eyes were more expressive than he probably thought they were. Or maybe it was just because Sasuke knew him so well that she was able to read them.

"That's not fair," Sasuke did _not_ whine, she _didn't_. "You couldn't have counted to two-thousand already, so there's no way you found me so fast. You cheated!"

He was laughing at her even if he didn't let it escape past his lips. "I didn't cheat, you just didn't hide your tracks very well. You ran through the forest like a rampaging bull." His fingers snaked out to tap themselves against her forehead, and even if she'd been quick enough to, she wouldn't have dodged them.

"Yeah, well," Sasuke folded her arms across her chest and did her best attempt at giving him the stink-eye. She failed miserably if his inability to be cowed by the action told her anything. "Rematch then."

"What's this I hear about a rematch?" That voice neither belonged to her nor her brother and almost sent her toppling off the branch in surprise.

Itachi didn't even flinch when a body dropped to land behind him, just looked over his shoulder in acknowledgement. Shisui Uchiha was very unlike any Uchiha that Sasuke had ever met. While the clan emboldened themselves with stoic faces to hide their easy irritability and habit of being quick to anger, Shisui was everything that they were not. Open minded, kind, and very down to earth, her cousin paraded himself around without the arrogance that others would feel had they been as talented as he was.

Dressed in a shirt and shorts only a few shades darker than her brother's, Shisui planted his hands on his hips and tilted his head to look down at them. The tantō that he favored wielding was strapped to his back with a brown leather harness hooked around both shoulders to hold it in place. Sasuke knew that Itachi had one to match, he just wasn't currently equipped with it.

"Shisui-nii!" Sasuke felt her face contort into a smile that she never gifted to anyone outside her immediate family. "What are you doing here?"

He returned her grin with one of his own. "Well, when I saw Itachi-chan disappear into the trees past the training grounds, I was curious about what he was up to. But I should have known that wherever it was that he was going, you wouldn't have been too far behind, little duckling."

The nickname coming from anyone else would've sounded condescending, but Sasuke secretly liked the term of endearment. When she had first met Shisui, she'd done so from the safety of hiding behind her older brother's legs. She was shy when it came to strangers and tended to flush an unflattering shade of scarlet whenever she was forced to hold conversation with a person she didn't know.

But her cousin had taken it in stride. Whether the name he gave her came from that first meeting or from the fact that she really _did_ trail after Itachi like a lost duckling, Sasuke wasn't sure.

"Nii-chan promised that he'd teach me his shuriken trick if I beat him at hide-and-seek," Sasuke sniffed. "But he cheated so I demand a rematch."

"Shuriken trick, eh?" Shisui laughed, the sound so open and loud and free, echoing up past the treetops. He jabbed her brother's side teasingly with his foot. "Which one?"

"The one where he throws them behind his back and hits the target without even looking."

"Ah." Shisui's own dark eyes danced playfully, a hint of a challenge sparking within their depths. "Well since he cheated, how about we have a fair rematch then? How does a race sound?"

"A race?" Itachi's eyebrow rose, though he didn't look put-out by their cousin's offer.

"Yup," the older boy nodded. Faster than Sasuke's eyes could track, one second he was standing on the other side of Itachi and in the next he was crouching in front of her. Shisui's back faced her and he gestured her closer. "Hop on, little duckling. If we beat Itachi-chan in a race back home then he'll have to teach you that trick of his."

While Itachi was a genius, Shisui was a prodigy in his own right. He was one of the youngest Uchiha to ever unlock his sharingan and rumors of his skills in combat spread across the clan like wildfire. If there was anyone who Sasuke would put her money on to beat her brother in a foot race, it was him (though when it came to combat she'd pick Itachi without blinking). So she didn't hesitate to clamour over and scramble onto his back. Shisui didn't even struggle to bear her weight as he stood, just hooked his hands underneath the backs of her knees.

Itachi sighed in mock exasperation, but rose as well in acceptance to their cousin's issued challenge. Sasuke had come to notice in her few short years, that there weren't a lot of people who were able to free her brother from the mask that the clan forced him to wear. He'd always acted a lot older than he was, always did what was expected of him without complaint. But she knew that he didn't like the life of a shinobi; didn't like to spill blood no matter who's veins it ran through.

There were only four whom he let see between the cracks. Herself, their mother, a girl she only remembered meeting once named Izumi, and Shisui. Sasuke was aware enough of the world around her to know that it wasn't a forgiving one, a gentle one. That Itachi got very few breaks between everything else where he got to just be _Itachi_. Where he could forget the burdens that lay heavy on his shoulders and embrace the childhood that he should've had.

That he _would've_ had if he'd been born in another life in another world to a family who never made him lift his hands in violence. And it was because of these very few pockets of air in the sea that threatened drowned him, that Itachi let himself catch his breath. His eyes glowed with a spark of childish youth as he bent his knees in preparation for a race.

"On your call, little duckling." Shisui's words were accompanied by a feeling that Sasuke could only describe like being super glued to his back. Except that there was no glue involved and she wouldn't have been able to unstick herself even if she'd tried.

His chakra acted like an adhesive to ensure that she wouldn't somehow accidentally end up slipping from his hold to become a splatter against a tree. It was a very common practice, both in the field by shinobi and at home with children and civilians who couldn't hold on with their own chakra. Travelling at the speeds that shinobi often did would be extremely dangerous if the passengers that they carried could easily be ripped away due to high velocity and a fluctuation of gravitational force.

"On your mark." Sasuke looped her arms loosely around Shisui's neck, clasping her left hand around her right wrist in anticipation. Her cousin's muscles tensed, fingers shifting their hold around her legs to a more comfortable position. Time seemed to freeze between the breath that she took to speak her next words and the last syllable that fell from her tongue. "Get set, go!"

Instantaneously, the world blurred around her into a nonsensical array of greens and browns. Sasuke's heart caught in the back of her throat from the shift between gravity and she was pretty sure that her stomach had been left on the branch they'd once stood on. It wasn't often that she got to do things like this. And if it weren't for the memories that plagued her, Sasuke would have thought that she'd been a bird in her past life for how much she loved the feeling of soaring through the trees.

There was something completely and utterly freeing about the wind that whipped at her cheeks and brushed back her hair. Of being able to let go of the stressors that anchored her to the ground and _fly_. She knew that there was no way she would've been able to track their movement because Shisui was too fast to catch, so Sasuke simply closed her eyes. Let a grin stretch her cheeks so wide that she knew they'd be sore by the end of their flight, but she couldn't bring herself didn't care.

And if both Shisui and Itachi took the long way around back to the compound, she wasn't going to tell anyone. Not when she caught the flash of her brother's rare, carefree smile gracing a face that saw too little joy. Because these were the moments that were meant to be cherished in a world that was nothing but unforgiving.

* * *

Sasuke wasn't sure what to do with herself.

Walking through the clan compound with her father at her side was something that she had never experienced before. Fugaku Uchiha wasn't a cruel man, and maybe if he didn't carry the stress that caused the edges of his eyes to wrinkle, he would've been a good father. One who wasn't too busy with clan dealings to spend time with his children outside of the family dinners that he sparsely made it home in time to attend.

The sun had long since begun its journey to set beyond the horizon and casted the sky in the warm light of evening. Most of the people who often graced the streets were absent, having already retired home to join their families. Though they did occasionally pass a few who always bowed their heads respectfully to her father. While their clan had been allocated a cramped space to erect their walls far on the edge of the village proper, that didn't mean that they were a small one.

She wasn't sure how many others shared their blood, but the Uchiha were large. She'd asked her mother once, though she was sure that it must have grown in the years after the war ended, the number was somewhere in the hundreds. Sasuke didn't know each and every face, but she could recognize the select few that she saw whenever she walked through the streets with Itachi or her mother.

And she'd walked them enough to be able to guess where her father was taking her. He hadn't said much before they'd left the house, just a command to follow. Things had been getting tense lately between the clan and the village. Sasuke had noticed it in their expressions and body language, and the trips that her mother took her to the market had become few and far inbetween. She didn't know _why_ and that frustrated her beyond belief. Talking to Itachi about it was impossible because it was one of the few things that he refused to indulge her.

Soon the stone beneath their feet gave way to grass as they traversed to one of the far edges within the Uchiha grounds. Sasuke easily kept up through their journey through the woods and trailed by her father's side faithfully when they passed through a treeline and emerged on the other side. A wooden pier stretched from where it met a pebbled shore to the middle of a lake that ran deep.

Their footsteps were silent as they walked out across it. (Sasuke had finally learned how to mute the sound of her feet after begging Itachi and Shisui to teach her.) She took in the way the fading light of the sun bounced off of the reflective surface of the still lake. Watched the leaves of the trees that lined the other side of it sway in the warm breeze that caressed the skin exposed by her training outfit.

Her father waited until they reached the end of the pier to speak, his deep gravelly voice capturing her attention. Fugaku Uchiha had a way of talking that forced people to listen. Not out of fear, but respect. With his shoulder length hair loose, he was still wearing his green jōnin vest layered over a long sleeve black top that bore the crest of the Konoha Military Police: a green star with the uchiwa fan in the center. If anything, the appearance of always being ready for war gave him a stern, unapproachable air.

"The Uchiha are a clan of many things," he began, eyes staring distantly out over the lake. "Pride, strength, intelligence. We strive to be nothing less than great, to conquer any obstacle that is put in our path. There are many ways in which people seek to gain power and there is a difference between those who find it, and those who keep it. Foundations need to be built upon in order to retain stability. The staples of the Uchiha are our use of fire and our mastery over the sharingan.

"While not all are able to unlock our dojutsu, if they are unable to produce fire, then they aren't Uchiha in anything but name." He looked over at her, his eyes the same shade as the deepest parts of the lake. They reminded Sasuke a lot of being buried beneath the depths of the sea, unable to feel the sun upon her face. "Today I will teach you how to manifest the flame with the Great Fireball Jutsu and you will master it."

There was no room in his statement for Sasuke to rebuke it and she knew that like everything else that had been thrust upon her in this life, she didn't get a say. While Fugaku Uchiha was a lot of things, a man who allowed his children to be weak was not one of them. She didn't have a choice in whether or not she succeeded in learning what he was going to teach her, because her father did not accept failure.

He hadn't asked her a question, but Sasuke nodded anyway.

"Face me and watch carefully. I will only show you this once."

Sasuke didn't dare blink as she watched her father's hands deftly move through a sequence of hand signs slow enough for her to differentiate between them. Horse. Snake. Ram. Monkey. Boar. Horse. Tiger. She'd been taught them all and how they worked to help the user mold chakra into performing whatever jutsu that they called for. And as she watched and committed them to memory, her father turned out to face the water, held his fingers up to his lips with a single hand that mimicked a bastardized version of the 'OK' symbol, and exhaled through his mouth.

Fire so bright that it threatened to sear itself into her sclera bloomed across the expanse of the lake. Even from where Sasuke stood a few steps behind him, the heat that bled from the flames licked at her skin with ghostly fingers. She was sure that had anyone been on the receiving end of it, they would've been incinerated by the flashes of blue that encompassed the center of it

Even when it faded, Sasuke was sure that if she closed her eyes, she'd be able to feel the fire like it'd never dispersed. Her father turned back to face her and she trampled down on the hesitation that threatened to drown her without even needing to dip below the water's surface. He didn't need to tell her to begin, just stepped back from the edge of the pier so that she could take his place.

Eyes closing, Sasuke drew her hands up and moved them through the appropriate hand signs. She could feel her chakra moving, twisting in response to the way that she was shaping it. It was the first jutsu that she'd ever been taught (chakra control exercises didn't count). The exact mechanics of how it worked was lost on her, too far advanced for her brain to be able to understand. But she didn't need a breakdown of the scientific details, she just needed to be able to do it and make it work.

"Fire Style: Great Fireball Jutsu!" Shouting the names of jutsu didn't impact anything at all, but it _did_ help the caster to retain focus and not lose the way they'd shaped their chakra. Sasuke brought her hand up to her face in a mimicry of what her father had done. She could feel heat building in the back of her throat and spared a thought that she hoped she didn't burn her mouth, and let it spill out with her breath.

The flame that she produced was nowhere near the size that her father's had been. If someone had observed both uses, they would have never related what she had done to his. Sasuke's lips grew hot, it wasn't painful, just a little uncomfortable. And she'd unconsciously squinted her eyes against the light. Fire shot out, more of a wisp than a ball. It was small and already she could feel a large chunk of her chakra dissipate into the air along with it. She didn't even want to imagine how much the one her father had done would cost.

Sasuke would be lying if she said that she wasn't disappointed. And she knew that it was stupid and impossible for her to have been able to do what he had when she was barely even seven, but she couldn't help it. Perhaps it was Uchiha pride that caused her to feel that way, which would later make her pause and wonder when, exactly, it was that she'd begun to see herself as _Sasuke the Uchiha_ and not just Sasuke.

Turning to look over her shoulder, she met Fugaku's gaze. Unlike Itachi, she wasn't able to get a read on him whatsoever. Even the stress that showed itself around his eyes was shifted into a blank-faced mask. He let the silence reign for a few moments longer before turning on his heel and leaving her there. His parting words kept her rooted to the wooden planks beneath her feet in fear of being nothing but a disappointment.

"Master it."


	3. Crude Awakening

Sasuke didn't leave the pier until the sun had set past the horizon and the moon had taken its place. She'd long since exhausted her meager chakra stores from attempting to master a jutsu that was impossible at her age. While she could manage to produce a small flame, making anything more than a stream just big enough to light a campfire was difficult. And she couldn't figure out why, no matter how many times she ran through the hand seals.

What she _had_ done though, must have passed whatever hidden test her father had been putting her through. Because instead of going through her morning routine with her mother like usual a week later, it was Fugaku who'd taken her place. Sasuke had been in too much of a shock to even think about asking him questions when she'd been ordered to dress and eat breakfast.

"You are starting at the Academy today." The words had been said with such nonchalance, with absolutely no forewarning, that Sasuke had barely stopped herself from choking on a bite of rice. Fugaku, who'd been sitting on the other side of the low dining room table, ignored her and sipped on his steaming cup of tea. "I expect you not to disappoint."

Not a question. Not a suggestion. An order. One in which she wouldn't have been able to say no to even if she'd tried.

That had been a month ago and Sasuke was only just now starting to adjust to her new normal. The morning routine that she'd had with her mother over the past seven years got pushed forward and she was woken up earlier. Before the sun could peek through the clouds, Sasuke was already out in the backyard doing chakra exercises and kata's for the Uchiha's specialized taijutsu style: Cat's Paw.

It focused on speed and defense rather than offense. A fighting style designed around its user possessing the sharingan. There was one other clan style that was intended for use by those who were unable to unlock their dojutsu, but Sasuke hadn't been taught it. At least not past the basics of being able to recognize it.

She would've thought that it was idiotic to make her focus on a fighting style around something that she may not ever achieve. Just because she'd replaced Sasuke didn't mean that she would be like him at all. But when she thought about it, it made sense in a way. Failure, it seemed, was all-around not an option for someone born to the head of the clan. Maybe if Itachi hadn't been a prodigy, Sasuke wouldn't have been held to such high standards. Wouldn't have been compared to the things that her brother had managed to accomplish before he'd even reached her current age.

If Sasuke had a little less knowledge of the world she was stuck in and a lot more desire to please, she would've been jealous of him. But she wasn't. Not when she knew what being the clan favorite brought on. It was yet another thing that Itachi had managed to protect her from and for that she was grateful.

After another boring day of Academy classes, Sasuke was more than happy to walk through the front doors. Children with energy that could only surface at the promise of freedom from an institutionalized education ran through the hallways excitedly. Hell, Sasuke would've joined them if she wasn't positive that she'd get reprimanded for it the minute that her father got home in the evening. Uchiha, for all of their pride and arrogance, were nothing but a bunch of shameless gossips when someone in the clan did something "disgraceful."

Pushing her bag further up her shoulders, Sasuke squinted at the bright sunlight as she exited the building. It'd only been a few weeks and she was already tired of attending the Academy. Since the normal age for enrollment outside of wartime was eight, she was younger than everyone else in her class. Not that it really mattered, because a year was nothing at all when she had the mind of an adult stuck in a child's body.

Her class was mostly made up of clan children so at least they were smart enough not to just sit there and drool on themselves. Sasuke was too shy to approach anyone outside of what was necessary for the few group collaborations, but even if she was outgoing, she didn't think that she'd want to hangout with them any longer than she had to. Interactions tended to be awkward and stilted because she didn't know how to hold a conversation with an eight year old when she was older than all of them intellectually.

Class itself was so boring that it took everything she had not to fall asleep. Sure, the courses on the history of the different countries were interesting enough to pay attention to, but that was about all. The first year at the Academy focused more on the basics like math, biology, and comprehension skills with a sprinkle of chakra theory thrown in. They wouldn't even get to _use_ it until their final year there, though the clan children already knew how since they practiced at home. But the small handful of civilian born kids in the class didn't get those opportunities.

Which was a bit elitist if you asked Sasuke.

Releasing a slow breath through her nose in her version of a sigh, Sasuke scanned the group of awaiting families to see if anyone would be picking her up for the day. More often than not, she was left alone to find her own way home now that she was old enough to attend the Academy. So when her eyes caught a flash of onyx colored hair and a wide familiar grin, Sasuke tossed her fear of being tattled on and sprinted across the yard.

"Shisui-nii!"

"Hey, little duckling." He was standing a little off to the side from the rest of the crowd of parents and his smile grew when she reached him. Shisui looked the same as he usually did except for the exhausted bruises beneath his eyes.

Sasuke hadn't seen her cousin for a little over a _month_ and could barely contain her happy surprise. "What're you doing here?"

"Well, I returned from my mission this morning and imagine my surprise when I was told that _someone_ had enrolled in the Academy while I was gone." His hand snaked out to ruffle her shoulder length hair and Sasuke squawked, but didn't attempt to move out of his range. "Had to come see it for myself."

"Really? How did your mission go?" She fell into step with him as they left the Academy gates and headed in the direction of the compound. "What'd you do? Where'd you go? Anywhere cool?"

Shisui chuckled in amusement at her barrage of questions and slid his hands into the pockets of his navy blue shorts. "Better than expected, which is good. And hm, that's classified. Classified. And…"

"Classified?" Sasuke squinted up at him with a pout.

"If you really wanna know, I guess could tell you," he shot a quick glance around them to make sure no one was nearby and bent down to whisper in her ear, mouth twitching when she leaned closer. "But then I'd have to kill you."

"Shisui-nii!" He easily dodged her attempt to smack the back of his head and laughed loudly at the glare she leveled him. "That was mean."

"Sorry." Her cousin didn't look the least bit apologetic. "How're your classes?"

Sasuke side-eyed him and huffed, "...Boring."

"I can't say I'm surprised." A cool gust of wind caught the wide sleeves of his shirt as they turned the corner into one of the residential sectors of the village. It was quieter than the main street they'd just come from and less people passed by. Evening was approaching and the street lamps lining the sides of the dirt roads were beginning to flicker to life.

"Was your experience boring too?" Sasuke absentmindedly kicked a rock with the tip of her sandal.

"I was only at the Academy for a year in total so it was a little different for me."

"Because you're a prodigy?"

Shisui's eyes flickered down to her and he tilted his head thoughtfully. "Something like that."

"What do you mean?" Sasuke had already known that her cousin was put through the Academy both early and quickly, the same as Itachi. It wasn't uncommon for prodigies to graduate early, especially during wartime. Both of them had been extremely young, not even her age by the time they'd been put onto a battlefield and expected to kill.

"Things were-" His sentence cut off abruptly. Sasuke looked up at him, took in the sudden sharpness of his eyes and tensing of his muscles, and faltered.

"Shisui-nii, what's wrong?" When she started to slow her steps in alarm at his sudden change, Shisui pressed a hand in-between her shoulder blades to keep her in pace with him.

"You know how to get home from here?" He didn't look at her.

"Yes, but-"

"Go straight home, Sasuke-chan." Rarely did her cousin ever use her name, which frightened Sasuke more than the sharp, serious line of his mouth.

"What's going on?" She tried again.

He finally looked down at her and she was caught off-guard at the sight of his sharingan active. The three black tomoe swirling circles around his bloody red painted irises had her own obsidian ones widening. "Listen to nii-san and go. I'll meet you there in a little while."

"But-"

" _Now_ , Sasuke-chan."

"Okay," her voice shook and she didn't know what was happening, but she'd never seen her cousin act like that and the stern tone of his voice had her feet moving. Shisui didn't follow her around the next corner and by the time she looked back, he was gone.

* * *

There was no funeral. No memorial service. No characters etched into a stone wall that took up space in one of the clan's oldest buildings. No whispers of his name on the lips of the people who'd once praised him.

No body left to bury.

Suicide, they'd called it. A coward's way out with only a single letter explaining things for those that had been left behind. Not that they'd let anyone outside of the clan elders read whatever its contents were.

 _Suicide_.

Sasuke would've scoffed if she'd been able to do anything other than choke back her own tears. Shisui Uchiha was not a boy who would die without a reason worth fighting for. Knowledge tickled somewhere at the back of her mind that told her his death meant something. That it had to do with whatever was going on between the clan and the rest of Konohagakure.

She didn't believe the rumors, knew that they weren't true, but she didn't have any tangible proof. All she had to go on were memories from another life that gave her absolutely nothing because she'd never finished watching the popular series. Hell, she'd barely even gotten past the time-skip. So she didn't have any foreknowledge to help her. And Sasuke would've investigated it herself if she'd been allowed to set a single foot outside of the compound without an escort. Every morning, her mother would drop her off at the Academy and pick her up right after classes let out. There was no lingering around, no more brief side trips to the market.

The whole clan had essentially gone into an unofficial lockdown overnight. Shinobi and those who were part of the Military Police were allowed to continue with business as usual. However, the few Uchiha civilians and children who didn't attend the Academy weren't allowed outside of the compound walls. And no one spoke about it, but everyone _knew_. Sasuke could sense the tension lingering in the air like an intangible miasma. Whatever was going on behind the scenes, whatever it was that people _weren't_ saying; Shisui's death was the catalyst.

To be honest, Sasuke had expected to be questioned because she was more than likely the last person to have seen him alive. But for some reason, despite the anxious days spent waiting, she was never approached. That in and of itself brought up a whole slew of red flags. The pieces of the puzzle were there, she just had to figure out what picture it made.

Sasuke hadn't seen Itachi in weeks and she didn't know where he'd gone. A mission, she knew. He'd been sent out on a lot of those recently. She'd only gotten a single glance of him after the news of Shisui spread and she really wished that she hadn't. Their older cousin had been Itachi's best friend and in the wake of his death, the mask that her brother hid behind grew stronger.

His eyes duller.

His smiles nonexistent.

Even if they weren't both so busy, Sasuke wasn't sure if he would talk to her at all. And it drove her insane to not be able to help him. Not that she even knew _what_ she could do because she didn't know what was going on. She'd taken to staying up late into the night, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling in hopes that she could recall something— _anything_ that might give her a hint. What was the point of having memories when they were nothing but useless?

It was one of those nights when Sasuke felt it. As she'd grown older and more adjusted to chakra, the ability to feel familiar signatures manifested. Every shinobi could, though there were some who were a lot better than others whose ranges could cover miles and miles. Sasuke didn't have that natural born ability and she could only sense people's chakra signatures that she knew well who were nearby.

Like Itachi's.

Sasuke threw her blankets from her body and slid out of bed. The rest of the house was asleep that late into the night so she had to channel chakra to silence her footsteps. Slipping down the stairs, she navigated through the darkened house by memory alone and didn't hesitate to slide open the rice paper door leading to the backyard. While they weren't as pompous as the Hyūga were, the Uchiha was a traditional clan. And their building structures showed it.

Sitting on the wooden walkway that connected the back of the house to the front was her brother, his back to her. The moon was full, sending streams of light breaking out through the select few darkened clouds to illuminate the grass. It was more like a courtyard than a typical backyard. A tall wooden fence boxed in the back of the house in a semblance of privacy, or at least as much as you could get in a ninja village. Ten feet from the six short steps that led up to the walkway, a cherry blossom tree stretched its branches high above. The light green buds would bloom soon; in a few months pink, soft petals would sprinkle across the grass to symbolize spring.

The crisp night air, slightly humid with moisture from the morning's rainfall perforated Sasuke's nostrils with the scent of damp earth. She took a deep breath and tried in vain to fight off the goosebumps that rose on the bare skin of her arms exposed by her short sleeve nightshirt. Itachi didn't turn to acknowledge her presence, not even when she crossed the few feet between them and sat down next to him. She didn't speak, just leaned against the railing and joining him in staring out across the yard.

Time seemed nonexistent, suspended in that moment like the two of them were stuck between the world that continued to turn and a dimension where there was nothing at all. Where the sorrows of life couldn't pierce the bubble that shielded them from reality. It could have been minutes, hours, days, weeks, and Sasuke wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.

"You should be asleep, Imouto," Itachi's voice was just loud enough to be heard over the crickets hiding between the blades of grass, but low enough not to drown them out.

"So should you," Sasuke answered back just as quietly. Her eyes slipped shut when a chilly breeze caressed the loose hair that spilled down her neck. "I haven't seen you in a while."

She felt him shift slightly, but didn't open her eyes to check. "I have been very busy. Things should slow down soon enough."

"Busy doing what?"

"It does not concern you."

"But it does." Sasuke finally looked over at him. "I'm worried about you."

Itachi's dark eyes met her own like a reflective mirror. "Why?"

An unamused snort left her. "You know why, nii-san. I may not be as smart as you, but that doesn't mean I'm stupid. Something is going on and no one will tell me what it is. Things have been changing ever since..."

She couldn't finish the sentence, but he knew what she was going to say anyway and a brief flash of pain flickered across his face before he buried it behind a blank mask. He turned his head away from her without responding. Itachi stared up at the night sky, at the stars shrouded behind a blanket of darkness. His eyes were unfocused, mind somewhere that Sasuke couldn't follow. Silence stretched between them again and she knew that she would never get an answer to her unasked question no matter how much she pushed.

Sighing in frustration, she shifted to lean against his side and rested her head against his shoulder. His high neck black shirt was thin, but she could feel the stiff armor that lay right underneath it. Her brother didn't react, didn't move to push her away, didn't speak. Sasuke hooked an arm around his and let her eyes slip closed once again.

"You're a good brother, nii-san," the words were mumbled into his shoulder as she felt exhaustion creep around the corners of her thoughts. "Don't ever forget that."

Itachi's muscles stiffened and she could feel his gaze boring a hole into the top of her head, but Sasuke didn't bother to look. Didn't want to see the expression fighting to break across his face. He didn't respond. The sound of crickets and the thin branches of the cherry blossom tree creaking in the wind filled the backyard like a haunting, slow melody.

Sasuke let sleep claim her and time resumed as the world continued to turn.

* * *

_Thunk!_

_Thunk!_

_Thunk!_

Obsidian irises watched in boredom as three shuriken flew through the air and pierced the red center of the target pinned to the post. They embedded into the wood with barely even two centimeters between one another. Just like they had the previous fifty times Sasuke had thrown them. Three years of daily, unyielding training had honed her throwing skills from abysmal to incredibly accurate. Very rarely did she ever miss what she was aiming for.

Which was exactly why she was feeling bored out of her mind and annoyed beyond belief.

The academy training yard had long since emptied of both students and teachers. Classes had been let out _hours_ ago and Sasuke sighed, crossing the distance to the training post and yanking the steel throwing stars out of the wood. They were warm from the amount of times she'd held them in her hands and she glanced up at the receding sun. The sky was painted in hues of oranges and yellows as it sank beyond the horizon.

Sasuke had been informed by her mother that morning that she'd be picking her up after classes let out and to not leave the grounds without her. It'd been the same spiel she'd been getting for the past year and she'd merely nodded absentmindedly before trudging through the front doors of the Academy. Her mother was late; she was _never_ late. In fact, Mikoto had been the one to hammer the importance of being on time into Sasuke's head so much that if she was even a minute late to something, she'd start to panic.

Hefting the balanced weight of the shuriken, two in her left hand and one in her right, she barely even glanced at the target before letting them fly. They sliced through the air with a high-pitched whistle, _thunk, thunk, thunking_ into the wooden post. Sasuke stared at the protruding steel points of the stars and felt her eyebrows furrow.

It was starting to get dark now, so where the hell was her mother? What could possibly be taking her so long to come find her?

Either she'd been forgotten about or her mother had sent a message to find her own way home that Sasuke never received. She felt the answer tickle the back of her mind, but for the life of her she couldn't bring it to the surface. Sasuke had felt off all day and couldn't figure out _why_. An irritated sigh fell from her mouth as she took up a throwing stance for the umpteenth time. If she wasn't such a well behaved child who became anxious at the thought of disappointing her parents, Sasuke would've left on her own a while ago.

Contemplating the possible reasons, she walked over and mechanically pulled her weapons from the post. The electric lamp posts around the training ground caused her shadow to spill across the grass. Sasuke glanced back out over the empty Academy yard, pausing, and made up her mind. Whatever, she was tired of waiting around and if her mother scolded her for not waiting then so be it.

The bottom of her high ponytail tickled the back of her neck past the high collared blue shirt she wore. Why the Uchiha were so obsessed with muted, dark colors and wanting to cover their collar bones was something that Sasuke had yet to figure out. Her hands found the pockets of her three-quarter black pants as she walked past the Academy gates and towards the compound. The road was empty at that time of the evening; when most families were sitting down for dinner.

As she walked, the occasional body of a ninja would flicker across the rooftops above too quickly for Sasuke to see their faces. Luckily, the compound was on the outskirts of the village so she didn't have to walk through the main streets of downtown to reach it and therefore didn't have to be subjected to the barely concealed hostile stares. With the high tensions between her clan and the rest of the village, the uchiwa fan stitched into the back of her shirt had become a target.

No one ever said anything outright to her, but they didn't have to because she could _feel_ it. The unofficial lockdown from last year had yet to cease and Uchiha barely even left the compound now. Instead of things getting better with time, they only seemed to worsen. Like the village stood on the tip of a knife, just waiting to see which way things would fall.

That was exactly the reason why she noticed the obvious _lack_ of stares drilling into the back of her head. While normally there weren't a lot of people out and about in the residential areas that she passed through, there were at least _some_ who littered the streets even so late into the evening. Not even the sound of insects hiding in the bushes made any noise. Everything felt... _off_.

A feeling of dread pooled at the bottom of Sasuke's stomach and she felt her pace quicken from a walk, to a jog, into a run. The rest of the world blurred past, fading into the background as her heart beat its way into her throat. Up ahead the walls of the compound came into view and the lack of guards turned her blood to ice. She flew through the gates, focus trained so hard on making it home that she failed to notice it.

Sasuke's sandal caught something hard and she was sent flying straight to the ground. A grunt escaped her lips when she failed to fully catch herself in time and the side of her face skidded across the road. Dirt scratched at her skin and she only got to spare a brief moment to wonder why it was wet before the smell hit her. The sharp, metallic tang of blood mixed with the scent of feces and death. She squinted open her eyes and wished that she hadn't.

Lying not even a foot away, staring back at her with glassy eyes was one of the clan members who frequently guarded the gate. He was almost unrecognizable with his neck torn open, flaps of skin exposing the inside of his throat, mouth open in a silent scream. Gagging, Sasuke scrambled to her feet. Tiny rocks from the dirt road dug into her damp, bare arms, but she was too frozen in shock to even register the sting from where her skin had been sliced open from her fall. Beneath the thick sole of her blue sandals, blood pooling beneath the lifeless body she'd tripped over painted them red. The side of her face, her arms, hands, fingers, clothes were stained with it.

Right behind her lay the other gate guard, but she couldn't look at him, could barely even focus past the nausea. How had she not seen this coming? She'd known. _She'd known_. But she _hadn't done anything to stop it_.

_Couldn't have..._

_...Didn't know..._

_...Whywhywhy._

A high-pitched, keening scream echoed from her throat _because hers wasn't torn out likehishishis_. Sasuke was hyperventilating, she could feel her lungs gasping for oxygen, but couldn't do anything about it. _Because she was uselessuselessuseless_. She'd gotten too comfortable, too disillusioned in the denial that the life she was living was _real_.

_But it couldn't..._

.. _.She_ _couldn't..._

 _..._ He _couldn't._

Sasuke stumbled forward, barely seeing the road beneath the heels of her _redredred_ sandals. Every step forward deeper into the compound brought the smell of more death. Bodies littered the street, spilling out of shops and stands and homes. She couldn't look at them. Couldn't see the faces of the people she'd failed to protect because she'd been too busy convincing herself that things would be different because _her_ Itachi wasn't _Itachi_.

Kunai and shuriken passed underfoot, embedded into flesh like they were nothing but training posts. Some of the windows of the homes facing the street were painted with streaks of blood. All of the street lamps that normally illuminated the compound were completely dark, leaving nothing but the full moon to light her path. Sasuke didn't know how long she walked. The only thing that kept her legs from giving out was that she had to find him; had to tell him that she knew it wasn't his fault because it was _hers_. For being unable to stop it. Unable to save him. Her vision blurred, limbs shaking with a chill that she couldn't even feel.

At least she didn't need to travel much further.

She found him standing in the middle of the next street down with the slaughtered bodies of their clansmen lying at his feet. Itachi's back was to her, his short sword already at home in the sheath that hung around his back. His chest was covered in a grey armored plate, long dark hair in its usual low ponytail and clothes soaked through with blood.

"Nii-san," Sasuke's voice croaked.

"Imouto," he responded, turning around to meet her gaze. Itachi's face was expressionless, obsidian colored eyes dull. Her mouth moved, but no words found their way out. Because how _did you apologize to someone you couldn't save_? "Nothing to say? Too weak to be able to speak up?"

He was trying to antagonize her. Trying to get her to lash out at him in anger. Perhaps because he felt like he deserved it, Sasuke didn't know. But what she _did_ know was that it wasn't going to work. No matter what he said, she knew that he hadn't done this out of his own free will. "No. You're not-you didn't-"

"I did. And do you want to know why?" He didn't give her time to answer. "Because you have the potential to become my opponent. You are someone who could be able to use mangekyo sharingan just like me. However, on one condition...you must kill your closest friend. Just like I did."

Sasuke rapidly shook her head, pieces of her blood soaked hair flying around her face. "No. You didn't kill Shisui-nii. I don't believe you. I _won't_ believe you because I know you didn't do it!"

He scoffed. "I did-"

" _Stop lying!_ " Sasuke screamed, the sound echoing through the lifeless streets. The next words caught themselves at the back of her throat. She knew that Itachi had spared his brother's life in the story, but he hadn't _known_. Would Itachi spare _her_ if she told him that she knew he'd been forced by someone to massacre the clan? Sure, her brother loved her, but how far would that go? Was it enough to stop him from killing her, or would he do it in fear of her revealing the truth?

Sasuke wasn't sure if that was something she wanted to gamble on. Her jaw clenched shut and she swallowed. Hard.

"I thought that you were smart, but evidently I was wrong." Itachi tilted his head to the side, eyes falling closed. "You are too weak for me to waste my time on any longer. Perhaps one day you will be strong enough to provide a challenge for me, but as for now you are nothing but a nuisance. When you have the same eyes that I do, come and stand before me."

He snapped his eyes open faster than she could react. Itachi's dark red irises spun with the black marks of his three-pointed mangekyou sharingan. And right before Sasuke was swallowed by darkness, she made a silent vow.

 _Itachi wasn't_ Itachi Uchiha, the clan slayer. _J_ _ust like she wasn't_ Sasuke Uchiha, the avenger. _And she would save him if it was the last thing she ever did._


	4. Sleep Paralysis

The moon was bleeding. 

Hues of red streaked across the darkened sky like a painter brushed blood through the clouds. The lights in the Uchiha compound were nonexistent, the streets illuminated by the moon. Everything was familiar, but not. Sasuke couldn’t move, couldn’t close her eyes to shield herself from the onslaught of visual stimulation, couldn’t block out the scent of death that clung to her nostrils. 

She didn’t know how long she’d been there, rooted to the same spot in the middle of a street overflowing with a river of blood and entrails and lifeless corpses. Over and over and over, she was forced to watch as Itachi mercilessly killed each and every member of the clan like they were pigs going to slaughter. Their screams of pain and cries for mercy echoed through the compound and embedded themselves deep within her eardrums. 

Sasuke had long since given up on trying to figure out a way to block it all out. Her body was being held in place by invisible strings as if she were some kind of puppet and her brother was the puppet master. There was no fighting. No way out except to endure it until it decided to end. 

_Tsukuyomi_ , her mind unhelpfully whispered. Itachi’s mangekyou ability: an inescapable genjutsu. 

She blinked without eyes and the scene changed. Shop fronts merged into walls and the screaming morphed into the low murmuring of her father. Sasuke was back in the main room of her home with the rice paper doors left open, and the figures of her parents kneeling on tatami mats. 

She couldn’t see their faces, just their backs as Itachi slid his blade between their mother’s flesh. Just the sound it made when her lifeless body hit the wooden floor and blood dripped from the empty hole her heart should have been. Just the breath that squeezed from their father’s red lips as his life fled his body. 

There was a pause like the end of a movie. 

And then an invisible hand pressed _replay_ and it started over again. 

And again. 

And again. 

And again, until Sasuke wasn’t sure whether she was dreaming or breathing or somewhere in between, and she silently begged to be met with the end of her brother’s blade so she wouldn’t have to watch it any longer. But some part of her endured the pain, the punishment that came to doll out the consequences of her inaction.

The faces of her clansmen filtered by one-by-one, eyes dull and mouths open as if accusing her of failing them. She would make it up to them, she silently promised. For eight years, she’d been dreaming.

(Perhaps some fates couldn’t be avoided, written in blood and stone and ink.)

It was time for Sasuke Uchiha to wake up.

**Four:** Sleep Paralysis 

She wasn’t sure what it was exactly that had her eyelids fluttering open. The gentle _beep, beep, beep_ of the heart monitor attached to her chest rang in her eardrums from somewhere behind her head. Sasuke could feel the pinch of an IV line sticking out of the crevice of her left elbow, and the roughness of the blanket draped over her still form aggravated her fingertips. At least the strong aroma of antiseptic cleared out the scent of death from her nostrils, even if it couldn’t do anything about the imprint that it left behind.

The hospital room was lit by the morning sun that filtered through the flimsy curtains hanging over the window. But it wasn’t the brightness of daylight that had Sasuke’s heartrate accelerating from the steady rhythm of sleep, to sudden alarm.

“Oh, you’re awake,” a soft exclamation of surprise came from the blonde nurse currently checking her vitals. Her appearance was a stark, shocking contrast to the hellish nightmare that Sasuke had been enduring for the past who-knew-when. Time was a fickle thing when it came to Tsukuyomi. “How’re you feeling, Uchiha-chan?”

 _How am I supposed to answer that_ , she asked herself. Physically, she was fine. Mentally, she was barely balancing on the precipice of functional.

“I­–” Sasuke winced internally at the way her voice scraped her dry throat. “Everyone…they’re…”

 _Dead_. Dead. _Dead_.

The nurse finished whatever it was that she was writing down on her clipboard and frowned. Her dark green eyes warmed over with pity. “Yes, they are. Now that you’re awake, there are people who want to talk to you. Let me go get them.”

Sasuke wasn’t sure what the protocol was for dealing with a child whose entire clan had been slaughtered in a single night, but surely it could have been something better than what it was. A single man from the Intelligence Division, Inoichi Yamanaka if her memory served her correctly, had come to try and get as much information about what had happened during the massacre. 

“What do you remember,” he’d asked as he shifted in his seat by her bedside. Long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail draped down his back with messily styled bangs held back by his blue headband.

Sasuke refused to make eye contact and instead opted to gaze down at how her small, pale fingers looked atop the hospital blanket. Someone had cleaned the blood off of her while she’d been unconscious, but she could still feel the ghost of warm stickiness between the crevices of her palms. Between the shock beginning to wear off and the despair that she was only just managing to hold back, she found that the only thing she could focus on was how dry her lips were as they folded around words.

“There was a lot of blood,” Sasuke responded in a monotone. “And bodies.”

She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to by crying or screaming or demanding in a fit of emotions, but she wasn’t and she didn’t know what Inoichi made of it all. He was an expert in psychology, after all. Maybe he’d catch on to the fact that she was more abnormal than a child her age should be. She couldn’t afford to have him take a walk through her mind and discover that she knew things she shouldn’t.

“That must have been frightening.” The man was speaking to her softly, like one would a spooked horse. He didn’t carry a clipboard or a notepad or anything like that to record the diagnosis of her mental well-being.

 _Of course, it was_ , she thought, but didn’t say aloud. Her hands clenched around the rough material of the blanket in lieu of an answer. It rubbed against the calluses she’d gotten from training with shuriken and kunai. A sliver of white peaked out from where it hooked around the outer area of her thumb to end at the meat of her palm; a scar that marked the time she’d first been able to pull of the shuriken trick she’d wheedled Itachi into teaching her.

A reminder as well as a reward. Because with pain came strength.

“Everyone’s dead.” Sasuke finally looked up to meet Inoichi’s pupiless gaze head on, face blank. “Everyone’s _dead_.”

And then she cried.

The first inclination she got that the village of Konohagakure wasn’t as good as it postured to be was the fact that it had forced a thirteen-year-old child to murder his whole family. The second was when she attended the funeral for her fallen clan. It had been a closed off thing where she was the only on present, and the dead had already been buried beneath the shifting earth.

Uchiha were strict on making sure to always burn the bodies of their kin before planting an urn of their ashes behind the Naka Shrine, near the back outskirts of the district. First, their spirits were fed back to the flames they were born from, and then what was left of their bodies given to the soil to rest. Funeral ceremonies were always a private thing where only members of the clan were permitted to attend.

Sasuke knew without a doubt that her family hadn’t been given the proper burial because Konoha never asked her to oversee the process. She could only hope that they were actually beneath the soil where they belonged.

The third inclination came shortly after, when Sasuke had been dropped off at the front gates to the Uchiha compound with nothing but herself, a small cat plushie, and the hospital discharge papers she held loosely in her hands.

At least she’d been given clothes to wear – though she suspected they came from Inoichi’s pitying pockets and not the village itself. The stuffed cat toy had definitely been a gift from the man once her tears had turned dry. But that was all. There’d been no visit from the Hokage to offer his condolences, not that she would’ve accepted the false platitudes anyway. No explanation of what she was supposed to do now without someone to care for her. Just an eight-year-old left to survive on her own.

In front of her, the gates to the compound appeared to be smaller than they once were. Maybe it was the lack of guards positioned off to the side to welcome her home, or perhaps the bars of a cell looked smaller once you discovered that you were being kept in a cage. Because that was what the district was to her now. Uchiha weren’t allowed to live outside of it, she’d learned after asking her brother why she never saw her kin housed anywhere else in the village. It was a law that had been dictated when Konoha was first founded.

Sasuke wasn’t sure how long she stood there at the entrance until she finally pushed through the gates. The seals etched into the archway that ensured no one who wasn’t approved to enter the compound were able to breach it, were inactive due to the fact that there were no more gate guards left to keep a steady stream of chakra flowing into them.

 _Hopefully_ , she thought, _the fact that it’s a literal ghost town will keep any thieves out, at least until I can figure out how to lay traps_.

Putting too much stock into trusting that Konoha would employ Anbu to guard it wasn’t something that Sasuke was willing to do. Sure, she knew that they wouldn’t let anything happen to her simply based on the fact that she was the last remaining Uchiha, and they would want to preserve that. So, her imminent safety wasn’t something that she had to worry too much about, at least not until she managed to activate her sharingan and people came to snatch her eyes from their sockets.

Konoha would, if nothing else, want to keep her alive until she was old enough to push out a few dark-haired babies to preserve the bloodline. Like some kind of prized racehorse.

Sasuke’s lips turned down at the thought as she took her first couple of steps into the compound. Someone had cleaned the streets of the dead bodies and the blood that had spilled through them, but she could still see where their imprints had been. With the sun starting to dip low beneath the horizon, it painted the sky in hues or orange and red that reminded her of being stuck in Tsukuyomi.

The silence was the worst part of having to work her way through the paths that her feet had long since memorized. Not the boarded-up shop stalls, or the darkened windows, or blatant lack of warm scents that used to flood the marketplace. Quiet, where there should have been the sounds of voices, and children’s feet _pitter-pattering_ through the parks, and the distinct clashing of blades when shinobi would train in the sectioned off fields.

Contrary to what people who weren’t Uchiha liked to believe, they weren’t unfeeling. They weren’t the cold, emotionless things that had no regard for anyone other than themselves. They were proud and strong, and while their lips were still, they hid their smiles in their eyes and their loyalty in the way they never failed to look out for one another.

So, it wasn’t the empty spaces that had Sasuke squeezing the small cat plushy in her hands until the softness of its fake fur pressed into her flesh. It was the sound of silence that proved just how alone she truly was.

Time wasn’t a thing that flowed freely in her mind when she finally made it to her house. Just like she had at the gates, Sasuke stood on the path that led to the front door and didn’t move. Not until the sun had dipped low past the horizon and plunged the district into near darkness. Someone must have done something about the streetlights because they flickered on, mockingly painting shadows against the walls of the rest of the abandoned homes that littered her street.

As spaced out as they were, she pretended that the occupants were just asleep and not dead.

Her sandals shifted against the ground, kicking up loose rocks when she turned abruptly from the door and made her way around to the back. Once she hit the wooden fence, she shoved her discharge papers in the pocket of her black pants, tucked the cat beneath her chin, and scrambled over the top. Sasuke had both her brother and Shisui to thank for playing hide-and-go-seek with her in the wooded training ground for what came next.

Their backyard looked just as it had before. All of the lights in the house were off, and she felt grateful for it. If it was dark then she wouldn’t have to look, wouldn’t have to _see_ just how empty it truly was. The green buds on the cherry blossom tree were starting to bloom, she noticed as she scaled it. Her palms gripped at the bark while she ever-so-slowly clambered up the thick branches.

Thankfully, it wasn’t as tall as the Hashirama trees that towered over everything else in the Land of Fire, so her journey was quick. But once she reached the appropriate height, Sasuke faced the most difficult part of her plan. Crouched down, she held her breath, sent up a silent prayer just in case any gods were listening for once and inched her way out across the slender branch.

Morning training with her mother always consisted of flexibility and that went hand-in-hand with balance. Which was probably the only thing that kept her from falling two stories down and breaking something – most likely her face. At the end of her short jaunt, her palms pressed against the glass of a window and she tugged upwards. It stuck for a moment before letting out a noisy squeak and sliding open.

 _Luckily_ , Sasuke thought as she slipped through the small opening, _Itachi left it unlocked_.

From the moonlight spilling in through the curtains, his room looked just like it always had. Organized without a thing out of place. All of his belongings were left untouched, as if he had only stepped out for a moment and was planning on coming back. Sasuke blindly toed off her sandals and tried not to look at anything as she shut the window and crossed the few short steps to his neatly made bed.

Her back sank down when she collapsed onto it. Hands shot out, searching in the dark until her fingers closed around one of his pillows and she dragged it towards her. Curling up on her side, she inhaled the comforting scent that still lingered, that reminded her of everything she’d lost.

And in the silence, Sasuke began to lay out the foundations of a plan. Konoha wasn’t endgame, she knew that. Her best bet was to stick around just long enough to get the strength and the knowledge to leave. Orochimaru was a problem that she was going to have to figure out a way to work around. Because becoming a puppet to a body snatching Sannin wasn’t something that she desired to live through. Sure, he could offer her strength, but at what cost?

“Before the exams then,” she muttered into the dark. Wary of any possible surveillance, she echoed the last bit in her mind. _I’ll get out of here. Find Itachi. And then…and then…together…_

Konoha was going to _burn._

For what it had done to her brother. To Shisui. To her mother. To her father. To her clan.

 _Yes_. Her fingers dug into the pillow with one hand and grasped onto the cat plushie with the other.

Sasuke Uchiha was always fated to be an avenger, in the previous life and the current. She had been asleep in a dream of make-believe.

It was time for her to wake up.


	5. Insomnia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: mentions of a panic attack.

Sasuke stared into the mirror and her reflection looked back.

Her hair, grown out enough to reach the center of her chest and dark like a moonless sky, draped around her face like a curtain. Bangs draped across her forehead, framed the delicate bones of her jaw and made the scowl that pulled at her bow-shaped lips look soft.

She’d long since noticed that she looked a lot like her dead mother with a sprinkle of Itachi dashed in. Uchiha were usually one of two things: delicately pretty in their large eyes, slim nose and soft lips, or sharply handsome that touched their angled chins, symmetrical faces and high cheekbones. Gender didn’t dictate which you were born under. For instance, Itachi followed the former category, while Sasuke leaned more towards the latter.

“Come on,” Sasuke’s voice echoed in the bathroom across the hall from Itachi’s bedroom. And while her reflection mimicked the narrowing of her long-lashed, obsidian hued eyes, nothing happened. There was no flicker of red and black; no change at all except for the way her frustration showed itself clearly on her face.

Which was exactly the problem.

“It should be easy.”

A blink.

Pale fingers clutched roughly around the cold, porcelain sink.

“Instinctual.”

An irritated sigh followed by a glare that no one but the bathroom’s sole occupant was privy to. 

After a night of tossing and turning and being unable to sleep – whether from the aftermath of everything that’d happened, or due to the long winded laying out of plans – she’d had come to a realization that had almost made he bash her head into a wall. Sasuke, the _Other_ Sasuke, had awakened his sharingan the night that Itachi slaughtered the clan and subjected his younger sibling to mind torture.

Which meant that there was a pretty large chance that she’d managed to activate hers as well and just hadn’t noticed it with everything else that’d been going on. Since it was brought out by heightened emotions of _feardeathdangerlossangerhate_ , there was no way that it _couldn’t_ have manifested. Other Sasuke hadn’t realized that he’d had it until that fight with…

…Hana?

Haru?

Hanbi?

Sasuke couldn’t remember the exact name of a boy who existed in a far-off place deep inside murky memories. What she did know, however, was that having the sharingan sooner rather than later would only serve to benefit her. She’d gone back and forth over whether or not _–_ if she _had_ activated her bloodline – it would be better kept as a secret.

The sharingan was something that would paint a giant, neon bullseye right beneath the uchiwa fan on her shirt. Would it be worth it to always have to watch her back from organ thieves? She was only eight years old, and even with the mandatory clan training, there was only so much that she’d be able to do until she got stronger. Orochimaru was already going to be a problem in a few years, and Sasuke had no desire to fight off one body snatcher, let alone an invasion.

Decisions, decisions.

Neatly trimmed nails danced across the sink as she tapped her fingers absentmindedly.

That would just have to be a problem for future Sasuke. If she could even figure out how to turn them on in the first place. If she even _had_ them in the first place. And if she did, then she could always hide the fact that she possessed her bloodline until she felt like she was strong enough to at least be able to defend herself.

A sigh passed her lips and her reflection stared back. Her eyes flickered to the door left cracked open with a purse of her lips. There had to be scrolls or books or _something_ on the inner workings of the sharingan somewhere in the clan compound. All she had to do was go out and try to hunt them down.

Mind made up, Sasuke flicked off the light, left the bathroom, and then headed towards the staircase at the end of the hall. She couldn’t recall there being anything related to their dojutsu in the house. And Uchiha as a whole were paranoid about any and all secrets pertaining to their eyes at best, and downright hostile at worst, which was exactly why there wasn’t a clan library.

Well, not out in the open at least. If there was any information on the clan technique, it would be well hidden away from anyone who might stumble upon it accidentally.

“I hate scavenger hunts,” she spoke aloud as she slowly descended the stairs. Talking to herself wasn’t a good habit to pick up when shinobi idealized stealth, but it was the only thing that could possibly fill the silence.

“I don’t even know where to start.” The lights in the rest of the house were off, but the sun filtered through curtain covered windows. “Maybe–”

Sasuke’s bare feet came to an abrupt halt on the last step. She knew that people had been sent out to clean up the bloodied streets and collect the bodies while she’d been at the hospital. Whoever had been slated for her house hadn’t put things back to the way they were supposed to be.

They’d left the thin, rice paper doors of the main room gaping wide open.

Her gaze was immediately drawn to the darkened spots on the wooden floor. Blood, she knew, was difficult to get out of clothes and even harder to remove from anything else. No matter how hard the panels had been scrubbed, the outlines of her parent’s bodies were still there. And Sasuke didn’t know what was worse; the way the memories of her brother’s blade sounded when it pierced through flesh, or the scent of iron and rust that still lingered in the air.

She could hear it.

Her mother’s last, dying breath. Her father’s deep voice speaking over the noise of dead spirits. Itachi’s inflectionless tone as he bragged about killing everyone else just to save them for last.

_(“No. You’re not–you didn’t–”_

_“I did. And do you want to know why?”)_

She could feel it, too.

The blood splattered on her face, still warm from the motionless body it seeped out of. The way it slipped between her toes as it stained the bottom of her sandals red. A moon, red and dark and empty. Being rooted to the same spot in the middle of a street overflowing with a river of blood and entrails and lifeless corpses.

It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

Sasuke slammed her eyes shut; her grip on the railing tightened until she could feel the polished wood tearing at the calluses on her palms. Her breath left her lungs in quick bursts, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find the oxygen to stop the black spots from creeping up behind her lids.

_It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real._

She wasn’t sure if she was chanting the words in her mind, or if they were falling from her numb lips. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Sasuke’s memories and Itachi’s false ones swam together until she wasn’t sure if she was still conscious or stuck in a nightmare, forced to watch it repeat itself in a never-ending loop.

_It wasn’t real. It wasn–_

Sasuke turned around on the stairs and bolted.

Insomnia

“Alright, I finally made it,” mumbled around the hair tie gripped between her teeth, Sasuke attempted to slip her sandals on with her feet. Her hands were currently occupied with tying her long hair up into a high ponytail to bother assisting with footwear.

Luckily, she tended to be very meticulous with her things and therefore the shoes lining the genkan of her apartment were far away from where she might trip over them. Technically, the place wasn’t hers – originally, at least. After her trauma induced panic attack years ago, she’d realized that living in the home where her family was murdered wasn’t feasible. Not if she wanted to access anything that wasn’t the upstairs bedrooms.

So, Sasuke had wandered the empty streets of the compound until she’d found an apartment that had been unoccupied before the massacre. It was located between the middle ring and the outer ring in a complex meant for unmarried shinobi who were independent from their parents. Moving in had been difficult to do alone, but she’d managed to scavenge furniture from some of the shops that she could carry.

At first, she’d felt guilty, like she was stealing from the owners. No matter if they were alive or not. But over the years, Sasuke had started to feel less like she was pilfering and more like she was just rearranging. As both the clan head and the only Uchiha left in the village, technically everything belonged to her. And until she’d figured out how to access her inheritance, she’d been left to take the clothes left in shop windows, and food from stalls that had yet to spoil.

No one had bothered to check in or see if she was taking care of herself properly, and for that, she loathed a majority of Konoha’s adult populace. Why would they leave a newly orphaned child alone to fend for themselves? What if she’d starved to death? It had been a long, tough lesson that taught Sasuke that the only person she could rely on to survive was herself. Not the Hokage, not the shinobi that made up the ranks, not the parents of her classmates that she passed by on a daily basis without them even saying a word to her.

She’d thought that her hatred for the village had been at its highest after they’d forced Itachi to kill his own family, but apparently, she was wrong.

 _No wonder_ , Sasuke had thought more than once, _Other Sasuke_ _turned out how he did_.

Balancing on one foot, she finally secured her ponytail and fully slipped on her sandals. They were the same black color as her pants that she tied down with bandages. Her shirt was one that she’d found in one of the Uchiha shops instead of the ones in the village market. Nowadays, she rarely searched through the abandoned shelves, but it had caught her attention and after quickly tailoring it to her measurements with a needle and thread, she’d brought it to Itana’s Outfitters for them to make copies of it.

Soft blue made up the body of it, but then it changed to grey in the sleeves and the turtleneck-esque collar. The shoulders were cut out and the material it was made of was too soft to be cotton, and too durable to be silk. On the back, right between her shoulder blades, an uchiwa fan was stitched into the fabric. Her hair was long enough to brush the bottom of the white handle when it was pulled up.

Satisfied that her ponytail was evenly centered, Sasuke clipped her weapons pouch to her left thigh and turned to the door. Just as her fingertips brushed the knob, she sighed. “Headband.”

She whirled around and caught a glimpse of the glinting metal of her newly acquired hitai-ate lying on the kitchen counter. Not really wanting to take her sandals back off just to walk fifteen feet and back to put them on again, she would have just left it there if it wasn’t required that she had to wear it. Instead of going through the hassle, she flipped forward onto her hands and silently thanked all of the years of flexibility and strength training when she made it to the kitchen without losing her balance.

Sasuke focused just enough chakra to the bottom of one of her feet to grab onto the black cloth of her hitai-ate, but not too much that it would tear. A few more strides on her hands later, and she gracefully caught her headband as she returned upright. Her fingers did quick work tying a knot at the back of her head and she took only a moment to adjust the metal on her forehead before heading outside.

By the time she arrived at the Academy, she was almost brimming with anticipation behind her carefully blank expression. The time for her plan to avenge her brother and her clan was steadily creeping up, and now that she was officially a genin, she would have access to stronger jutsu to improve her meagre repertoire. She’d yet to figure out how to activate her sharingan and part of her had long since given up on the possibility of her even having it.

Channeling chakra to her eyes was dangerous, she knew, but she’d tried it anyway only for it not to work. Maybe there was more to it than simply doing that? Remembering all of the pain and the anger and loss that she’d felt the night of the massacre hadn’t done anything. Neither her father nor her mother had taught her anything about it besides information on what it could do. Learning how to use it was probably another rite of passage – like learning the Great Fireball jutsu ­– once one activated it. Little good that did for her now.

And she hadn’t been able to find any scrolls lying around the compound that weren’t sealed away behind fuinjutsu encased cabinets in the clan elder’s homes that she couldn’t figure out how to disable. Well, she _figured_ that they contained useful scrolls or books, because why hide them otherwise?

Sasuke had gone through a brief stint when she was ten years old where she almost obsessively attempted to teach herself fuinjutsu. However, it hadn’t taken her long to realize that it was a worthless avenue to approach without a proper instructor. Konoha’s main library lacked any substantial information regarding the subject, and ninja were notoriously stingy when it came to sharing their skills when they didn’t even know you. Regardless of whether or not you were one of the last living members of a prestigious clan.

 _That_ had been an embarrassing lesson to learn after being turned away from all of the shops in town that sold even a single storage scroll or explosive note. Teaching someone how to recreate your biggest money-makers tended to be somewhere on the scale between Hell, and No. The only good thing that had come out of the experience was that Sasuke could read basic seals that had anything to do with storage and fire. And it’d only costed her ego taking a hit to do so.

“Sasuke-chan!” An energetic shout came from her left after she slid open the door to the classroom. She didn’t even need to glance over to know who it was; she could recognize the annoying pitch to that voice anywhere. “I saved you a seat!”

Ami Whateverherlastnamewas. Civilian born, short purple hair, brown eyes, and a penchant for Sasuke’s self-restraint. No matter how many times she told the girl to leave her alone, or pounded her into the dirt during taijutsu class, Ami refused to give her peace. She was right up there near the top of Sasuke’s list with Ino Yamanaka and Sakura Haruno. It didn’t matter that she knew the last two would mature eventually, because “eventually” wasn’t _now_.

Without letting her expression fall into one of irritation, she passed the front row bursting with purple, and continued up the steps to the back. Shikamaru Nara already had his head tucked between the crease of one of his elbows face-down on the table. His black, spiky ponytail was haphazardly put together in a way that spoke of an attempt to escape his overbearing mother.

Next to him, nearest to the wall, was Chouji Akamichi munching on a bag of potato chips. He gave her a cheerful wave and Sasuke returned his greeting with a nod of her head before taking the empty seat on Shikamaru’s left. She wasn’t friends with either of them, but since they generally left her alone, she tended to sit next to them whenever she was in class. The rest of the room was half full already with new genin all-but tearing at the bit to finally be let out into the world of adults.

Four years. It’d been four _long_ years that she’d waited to graduate from the Academy, being forced to endure endless hours of mindless droning about topics she already understood. Having to deal with the hordes of annoying kids all falling over themselves to vie for her affection made it almost seem worth it. Almost.

At first, their attention had made Sasuke extremely uncomfortable. Sometimes it still did, whenever one of them would try to flirt with her. She wasn’t sure if the kids were just being encouraged by their parents to try and win over the last Uchiha left in the village, but that still wasn’t an excuse. What made them think that harassment was a good way to do so?

She’d learned long ago that being nice or trying to brush them off or attempting to avoid them all together only further encouraged them. The only way to even possibly get through to them was with sharp, blunt words. That may have ended up with her labeled as a stuck-up bitch from some of her classmates, but Sasuke quite frankly couldn’t care less. She didn’t _need_ friends. She didn’t _want_ friends. Not when she was planning to leave everything behind in less than a year anyway.

All she had to do was endure being placed on a team with Naruto Uzumaki, Sakura Haruno and a negligent Kakashi Hatake for a few months and then she’d be off with Itachi. He’d take her in and then they’d take down both Konoha and Akatsuki all in the name of family bonding.

A loud commotion coming from the front of the room had Sasuke’s attention snapping towards the door with a sigh. A flash of blonde and pink was all she needed to see to affirm her previous thoughts of burning the whole place to the ground. Ino and Sakura were stuck in the doorway, elbowing each other and screaming insults as they tried to be the first one inside.

“I won, so I get to sit next to her, Ino-pig!”

“No, _I_ won, Forehead!”

Sasuke sunk low in her seat like that would somehow make a difference. Once they set their sights on her, she would be a sitting duck. Though…her eyes drifted over to Shikamaru and she briefly debated on the merits of using him as a human shield. He may have been childhood friends with Ino, but she knew for a fact that she tended to annoy him just as much as she did Sasuke. Then again, Nara were horribly loyal when it came down to the wire.

“Hey, what about me, Sakura-chan?”

A burst of orange appeared behind the two wrestling girls and Sasuke didn’t know whether or not it was a relief that Naruto got his headband after failing the test two days ago. Because that meant that her presence instead of Other Sasuke didn’t mess that up at least. Not that it really mattered, but it would have been one more sliver of guilt to add onto her conscious.

Chouji would be just as useless, if not more, than Shikamaru. He was way too friendly and would more than likely just end up being bullied by Ino until he relented. However…Sasuke switched her stare to the bag of chips he held in his hands and weighed the probability of being able to steal them from him to use as projectiles. That could end up being more dangerous than dealing with Ino and Sakura by herself. One simply didn’t snatch food from an Akamichi and expect to survive it.

“Go away, Naruto!”

Shikamaru stirred to her right, more than likely being dragged out of his nap due to all of the yelling. A mark from having his cheek pressed up against his shirt sleeve for an unknown amount of time made itself known, not that he seemed to realize. His head lifted just enough to see what was going on and let out a sound that was a hybrid of a sigh and a groan. “How troublesome.”

Sasuke couldn’t help but silently agree. It wasn’t that she hated the three loudmouths. She was well aware of what they who grow up to be in the future, however that did little to endear her to them now. After being on her own for so long, forced to live in the ever-silent Uchiha district, loud noises pricked at her senses and made her tense. And just being around Ino or Sakura in general made her extremely uncomfortable.

She didn’t know why they were in a competition to, what, be her friend? Whether or not the two girls held affections towards her that leaned further than friendly, she had no clue. Sometimes Sasuke thought that the blonde may have been trying to flirt with her, but then again, her grasp on normal human interactions was tentative at best, and abysmal at worst. She didn’t care if they had a crush on her, she just wished that they’d leave her alone in general.

“Enough!” Iruka stormed into the classroom with a clipboard in hand and a scowl on his face. “Everyone quiet down and sit, I’m going to be announcing your teams.”

While the man lacked the ability to ever be able to take full control of a classroom due to his lack of true assertiveness, all of the newly minted genin were excited enough to listen for once. They clamored into their seats just as Iruka planted himself in the front of the room and began reading off of the paper attached to his clipboard. Zoning out wasn’t difficult at all when she already knew what her fate would be. Sasuke just watched with glazed over eyes and daydreamed about what she was going to grab for dinner. Perhaps she’d order out from the sushi place a few blocks away. Or maybe…maybe okonomiyaki sounded better. She _had_ eaten sushi just last week, and it had been too long since she’d had–

“Team Seven will be Sasuke Uchiha, Naruto Uzumaki, and Shino Aburame.”

Sasuke was dragged out of her wandering thoughts like she’d been doused with a bucket of ice water. That…didn’t sound right.

“What.” Her monosyllabic reaction was drowned out by Naruto’s shout.

“I’m stuck with the Hime?”

Most of the girls and the boys grumbled and huffed and complained. Somewhere a few rows down, Sakura dropped her head onto her table with an audible thump, and Ino let an angry scowl pull at her lips while she glared daggers at Iruka like it was somehow his fault.

Wide, obsidian eyes looked across the aisle at a figure with wild brown hair dressed in a grey trench coat. Shino turned his head to meet her gaze – though it was hard to tell given his blacked-out sunglasses ­– and if he had any protests to his team placement, it didn’t show on what little of his face she could see.

She had never had a conversation with the boy, and she didn’t know what opinions he held of her. What she did know, however, was that Shino Aburame was not supposed to be on her team. Had the change been made because Konoha created teams on a boy-girl-boy structure? If that were true, then what else would end up being different? Sasuke didn’t like it when things differed to what they were supposed to be. 

“Team Eight is made up of Hinata Hyuga, Aito Tanaka, and Kiba Inuzuka.”

The second name was one that she didn’t recognize, not that it was really a surprise since she’d failed to pay attention to any of the other kids in class besides the Rookie Nine. And even then, her awareness of them was just brief enough to acknowledge that they existed.

“Team Nine are Sakura Haruno, Fuji Watana, and Kai Kimura.”

Sasuke didn’t bother paying any mind to the rest of the team layouts because she was too busy hiding a brief surge of panic behind a deceptively calm façade.

No, none of that sounded right at all.


End file.
